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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 2nd, 2023

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  • Sadly my parents’ new IP phone service uses the dialtone as some kind of branding trick - you go off-hook and get this “designed” audio prompt that slides into a normal dialtone, presumably to make you remember you’re not just using “the phone”. It was very disconcerting when I first heard it.









  • If your company is using story points to “measure” developers, they are completely misusing that concept, and it probably results in a low-teamwork environment (as you describe).

    The purpose of story points is so a team can say “we’re not taking more than X work for the next two weeks. Make sure it’s the important stuff.” It is a way to communicate a limit to force prioritization by the product owner.

    And, in fact, data shows that point estimation so poorly converges on reality that teams may as well assign everything a “1”. The key technique is to try to make stories the same size, and to reduce variability by having the team swarm/mob to unblock stuck work.

    Who creates these tasks? They need to close the year old items, reevaluate the work and break it down into sub-5-day chunks. If there are so many unknowns that it’s impossible to do that, the team needs to brainstorm how to resolve them.


  • I got permanently banned for reporting spam (“abusing the report button”) after I reported 8 Vice articles posted in /r/politics by the Vice self-promotion account in one day.

    Meanwhile, the spam guidelines page says - if you create an account primarily to promote your own content, you may be a spammer. And as a redditor, you should report spam.

    They lost a 12 year long user who primarily engaged in niche technical subjects who went out of their way to answer newcomers’ questions.